Tod Maffin

Background

Maffin was born and raised in the Vancouver, Canada area. He began his career in journalism, working for KBS radio in Creston in the early '90s as a reporter and weekend anchor. He then moved to the Sunday Press, a community newspaper based in Sechelt, B.C. as the lead civic affairs reporter.

Technology

Maffin became the Director of New Media at the Haibeck Group, a Vancouver-based public relations firm, developing the early web strategies for large corporate clients. He joined the Internet services firm Emerge Online in 1995 as its Senior Strategist and, later, Vice President of Marketing. In 1997, Maffin moved to Emerge's competitor, IMEDIAT (later rebranded as communicate.com) where, as Executive V.P. of Marketing, he led the company's rapid growth into new markets.

Maffin left IMEDIAT to start his own web strategy consulting firm and, in 1999, developed the concept for an artificial intelligence engine that could rank the subjective mood of public opinion. He and three other partners launched MindfulEye.com, developing Maffin's idea into a technology service ("Lexant") which began selling services to major brokerage firms and securities commissions. The Lexant engine was used to perform syntactic analysis on public opinion comments posted on the Internet and aired in the media, in order to provide a “mood monitor” of stocks. MindfulEye.com began trading publicly in 18 months through an RTO of a Nevada firm. The firm initially raised three rounds of venture capital but got caught in the "dot com bomb" and had to close down when it was unable to secure additional funding.

Radio and television

Maffin is a regular guest-host on Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM and a commentator on technology and business trends in the media. He co-produced and hosted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's live interactive national radio program "todradio.com" on CBC Radio One for two seasons beginning in 2002. The series aired live across all of Canada's five time zones using five separate shows, each unique to its region. It was co-hosted by Tamara Leer.

Maffin also spent four years as a national producer on CBC Radio One's Definitely Not The Opera magazine program. During this period, he authored "From Idea to Air: A Field Guide to Freelancing for Public Radio". He also hosted and produced a short-lived radio documentary program called "Real Life Chronicles" which ran regionally as part of CBC Vancouver's North by Northwest weekend arts program. It was later picked up by the network and aired during CBC Radio's flagship morning program "Sounds Like Canada."

As part of the network's coverage of the 2004 federal election, Maffin crossed much of the country in the CBC's "Canada Votes" election bus which traveled Canada producing stories and short documentaries about Canadians' reaction to the election campaign. He then began weekly television reports on technology on CBC Television's Canada Now national newscast and also worked as CBC Radio's national technology columnist. During the CBC's 2005 labour dispute, Maffin produced a blog and podcast which became the focal point for news about the labour dispute, generating more than 10,000 unique visits a day near the end of the lockout. After the lockout, the CBC hired Maffin to create and author its official blog, InsideTheCBC.com. In 2008, Maffin handed the editorship over to Paul McGrath, a CBC employee.

Blogtv.com also hired Maffin to do a live, weekly webcast program on technology, todbits.tv. The program covered trends in business technology, web strategy, and consumer electronics.

Books

Maffin is the author of four books:

Podcasting

Maffin's podcasts have included the series Egg McMaffin, which highlighted Maffin's picks in public radio short documentaries. It later changed focus to feature informative tips on doing tasks people take for granted, becoming the How To Do Stuff podcast. Maffin was an early supporter of podcasting, and at one point embarked on a national tour of eleven cities to evangelize the technology. Holding "meetups" in each city, Maffin assisted new podcast producers. He also was hired by CBC Radio to develop the network's podcasting strategy and internal publishing tools.

He launched and managed CanadaPodcasts.ca, a national podcast directory, and started the Foursevens Podcast Collective, a network of podcasts he thought represented the best in content, eventually turning CanadaPodcasts.ca over to the Rogic Network when he ceased producing podcasts.

Speaking

Maffin speaks to between 35 and 50 conferences and meetings a year, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, on topics related to digital communications. He works with a variety of agencies, including Speakers' Spotlight, National Speakers Bureau, and The Lavin Agency.